


Some Things Stay Broken

by reapertownusa



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bondage, Caning, Castration, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mute Dean Winchester, Non Consensual, Sensory Deprivation, Strapping, Torture, Whipping
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-12-18
Updated: 2010-12-18
Packaged: 2017-11-27 01:27:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/656497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reapertownusa/pseuds/reapertownusa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After five months of torture and abuse, the Dean that Sam knew is gone. The boys struggle to find a new sense of normal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Things Stay Broken

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Details the effects of brutal long term abuse / torture / rape resulting in permanent physical damage, mutilation (castration) and psychosis. Not graphically explicit, but it's not pretty so if anything in that realm makes you uncomfortable, steer clear. 
> 
> Author's Note: Takes place in a Season 3 where 'All Hell Breaks Loose' didn't happen. Originally posted in part for a blindfold_spn prompt requesting Dean damaged from prolonged captivity and abuse. This is for one of the world's most patient readers, lmcdon, who awesomely managed to kick my butt into finally posting this. Major thanks to the mistress of details, smidgeson, and the comma queen, sailorhathor, for their beta work.

Five months. 

For five months, Sam stayed alone in trashy motel rooms, hopping from town to town, tearing through every demon he could summon. For five months, he was the only one to turn the Impala’s ignition key, flipping through cassettes that he didn’t even like but couldn’t stop listening to. For five months, just the word pie stung his eyes and fueled the hurricane of fury ripping him apart, piece by piece. 

Tenaciously he clung to the rage. In the loneliness it was all that remained to animate him. 

Those five months came and went without a word of smart ass commentary. There were no annoyingly self-assured smirks or the playful twinkle of cocky green eyes. Silence hung heavy instead of the constant background noise of amused chuckles and humming by day, and reassuringly gentle snoring by night. No one nudged his ribs or patted his shoulder. No one touched him at all. 

It was worse than just being alone. Half of his soul had been torn away and it had taken five wasted months for Sam to realize that he had been searching for his better half in all the wrong places. The demons hadn't been lying about knowing nothing. 

It had been humans all along. Hunters. 

When he found them, it didn’t matter what they had been. Sam took his time and didn't stop until there was nothing left. 

It wasn't just that they had taken his brother. It was what they said they had done to him. There hadn't been any persuasion needed to force them to talk. The horrid details had spilled freely from their lips. His only struggle had been getting them to stop talking. 

Only when they all lay silent did he descend the narrow staircase, his hands sticky with drying blood. He'd have to notice it to bother with trying to wash it away. Right now his mind was far from his body. 

His steps were hesitant. The weight of the need to see his brother crushed his chest and tightened his throat. He wanted to race down the steps, pull Dean into his arms and pretend the past months had only been a nightmare. 

But the cryptic words of the dying hunters rang in his head, all but pinning him in place. 

_He smirked at me and I took the leather and buckle to him. Last smile to ever touch his lips._

If he didn't go any further, Sam could write off the words as the hunters blowing smoke. He could still imagine that Dean was fine. That somehow, after five months of captivity, his brother was just sitting in a cell, bored shitless and waiting for Sam to finally be the one to rescue him. 

Another few steps and he stood at the bottom of the stairs staring into an old basement laundry room. The door was open, but there were no windows, no lights. He might as well be standing on the precipice of a black hole. 

He took in an uneasy breath and gagged. The heavy air was laced with the putrid scent of sewer. 

_Might not be housebroken, but the rest of him is good and broken._

When his blood-caked finger flipped the light switch there was a delayed flicker before a buzzing florescent fixture kicked on to wash the room in a starkly bright light. The walls were faced with orange and harvest gold laminate panels and the cement floor surfaced with a chipping teal paint. 

Inside the door were wall-mounted coat hooks. From one hook hung a heavy razor strop, from another a distended metal hanger, a cat o' nine tails and the crook of a rattan cane. 

_We whipped that cocky prick into a good little bitch._

From the doorway he surveyed the area for any signs of a trap. All he saw in the small, empty room was a heavy, rusted chain anchored to the center of the floor. He took a step inside to check the blind spot he couldn't see from the doorway. 

Time froze when his eyes followed the chain to a body in the corner. 

It was naked and huddled against the wall, still as death. A black hood pulled over the head concealed the face beneath. Sam would have been sure the man was dead if not for the crouched position that a corpse couldn't have maintained. 

_Ain't never gonna talk back again._

The man curled into himself as if trying to shrink from existence. Careful observation let Sam make out a subtle movement. Nausea licked the back of his tongue when he realized he could see each one of the emaciated man's ribs rise and fall under the cover of a tightly stretched expanse of ghostly white skin. 

Once his eyes adjusted to the light, he couldn't look away from the brutally scarred flesh of the hunched back. Parts of the back were obscured by the man's no less scarred arms. Unpadded handcuffs locked the wrists against the man's overly accentuated spine. 

Around the man's neck was a narrow iron ring. Sam couldn't bear to think the word ‘collar’, but simultaneously knew that was exactly what it was. While it wasn't attached to the metal chain lying unlatched on the floor, Sam could see the loop where the two could be connected. 

Whore tried to strangle himself with his own leash so I beat him bloody with it. 

This was just some poor bastard that had gotten caught up in the middle of this. The chain-wrapped skin and bones in the corner didn't belong to his brother. It couldn't. As long as the hood remained over the man's head, Sam could continue to believe that. 

Stepping closer, he slipped on the slick concrete. His stomach churned. It wasn't as if it would help to give a man bound in this state so much as a bucket to piss in. Instead, there was a hose lying beside the floor drain. 

A couple steps closer and he saw the crouching man's subtle shivering. A few remaining beads of water slid down the abused skin. 

_Took real good care of him. Even made sure he got his daily shower._

It was enough to give Sam something concrete to do. He shrugged off his jacket. Regardless of who this man was, he needed help. 

"I'm going to cover you up, okay?" Speaking calmly to someone so brutalized was a struggle, but he kept his voice as even as possible. 

Though seemingly conscious, the man had yet to react to him. There was no movement at all until Sam set a hesitant hand on the man's clammy, trembling shoulder. 

Sam had expected panic, but there wasn't the slightest hint of surprise. The man had already known he was there. At the ghost of a touch, the man merely shifted his position, struggling to move from crouching to kneeling. 

As the man repositioned himself, the room echoed with the clanking of metal. Chains linked the shackles on the man's ankles and ran back up to the handcuffs binding the man's arms behind his back. From the arrangement of the chains, it looked impossible for the man to so much as straighten his legs, let alone stand. He didn't try to do either. 

Instead, the man lowered himself to the floor. It was little more than a controlled fall forward that the man let his deeply bruised shoulder take the impact of. While his chest lay pressed against the filthy concrete, he kept his knees beneath him and his rear in the air, jutting his ass in Sam's general direction. 

_Just touch him and he'll beg for a fuck._

Swallowing down acid, Sam looked away. His eyes again found the implements hanging by the door. The golden yellow panel behind the coat hooks was blotched and smeared with browned crimson where the whips still wet with blood had repeatedly made contact when being hung. 

He wondered how many lashes it had taken before the man had submitted to rape rather than receive another stroke. He wished he had seen this before killing the hunters. 

When Sam looked back at the man, he was still waiting obediently. Sam wanted to scream for him to get up, for himself to wake up, but his eyes became lost following the latticework of discolored and raised scars that answered his question. 

The number of lashes endured was too numerous to count. Most were healed, but not cleanly. There was little hint that any care had been given even to the most severe gashes. It was a miracle the man was still alive. 

Miracle wasn't the word. Sam knew if it were Dean, his brother would rather be dead. 

While the man was shackled to himself, he wasn't restrained to anything else. Nothing was physically keeping him in the room with an open door. 

_We taught him the rules and the consequences._

It was too much for Sam to consider what 'consequences' the hunters had inflicted for moving towards the door that the man was staying as far as possible from. 

When Sam stepped forward to lay his jacket over the man's back, an out of place bulge in the hood near the base of the man's neck caught Sam's attention. His brow furrowed as he knelt down to take a closer look at the thin cord that ran from it before slipping back beneath the hood. 

He tried not to think about the state of the man as he ran his hand tentatively over the slick black leather to find a concealed pocket. From it he pulled out an iPod that was pristinely white until Sam's fingers smeared red over the controls. 

Absently he wiped his hand against his stained jeans and stared at the seemingly out of place device. Slowly his eyes focused on the display screen. It was on and set to repeat whatever song it was playing at a ridiculously high volume. 

When Sam unhooked the iPod's cord from the hood, the man's tautly pulled shoulders tightened. It was the first indication of unease Sam had seen. 

The man who looked too frail to be alive scooted his knees forward and summoned the strength to raise his torso without the use of his arms. The jacket slipped unnoticed from his shoulders. He remained kneeling at Sam's feet with his head bowed to his chest. Every angle of his body screamed of anxiety. 

If it was possible, the man deteriorated further before Sam's eyes. The rigidly tensed body began swaying, at first almost imperceptibly, then accelerating to an agitated rocking. It was immediately after Sam noted the panicked heaving of the man's chest that the world fell out from beneath him. 

A blue pentacle was tattooed over the man's heart. 

“Dean?” 

Sam could barely choke out the name in association with the gaunt body. Even after he said it, nothing changed. The man only continued to rock. He couldn't help but hope the man didn't realize Sam was speaking to him because ‘Dean’ wasn't the man's name. 

When his hand again touched the back of the hood, the man raised his head as if looking up at him, though he couldn't possibly see anything. His eyes and ears were sealed off completely. 

_Only thing that mouth is good for is taking cock fulls. All the dinner he needs._

Sam's stomach churned. 

A large ring gag served as a mouthpiece to the hood. The only other openings were two small nostril holes. By the sound of the hollow, panted breaths, the man was already struggling to breathe. Yet the man who was bordering on suffocating was waiting for Sam to shove something in through the gag. 

There was only one thing Sam wanted more than a ticket to hell to join the hunters who had done this, and that was for the man beneath the hood to be anyone other than his brother. 

Driven by a need to prove that it wasn't Dean, Sam's fingers tore at the knots that sealed the hood and worked loose the tightly secured laces. He began to part the leather when the man who had kneeled petrified suddenly flung himself away. 

With a thud the man landed on his back, smashing down on his arms and no doubt hitting his head, but without so much as a grunt. Sam froze mid step on his way to help. 

The arrangement of the shackles forced the man's legs to splay open. It was the first unavoidable look Sam had gotten of the man's groin. He instantly wished he could take back the painfully clear view. 

_Did the world a favor and neutered that rabid dog. Best breakfast he's had here._

It hadn't been obvious at first because Sam hadn't been looking and they hadn't removed everything. The man's cock was untouched except for the sharp glint of a metal piercing at the head, but the rest was gone. What could have been a lethal wound was cleanly healed. Apparently it was the only medical attention the man had received. 

Sam didn't make it to the room's utility sink before nausea won out, splattering over the already sticky floor and adding to the acrid smell of the putridly stale air. 

He only got close enough to the deep, grungy sink to see the large anal plugs that had been tossed in the bottom with some knives, a funnel and bowls filled with moldy bits. He got close enough to see the blood caked on the sink's sides. 

A fresh wave of sickness hit him. His hands braced on his knees as he gulped to pull air down his stinging throat. Moisture blurred his eyes by the time he could again force them open and turn back to the prisoner. 

Pure, animalistic fear radiated from the man who had smashed himself back into the corner. Sam's gut flipped again as he considered what punishment the hunters must have delivered for removing the hood. 

Again moving closer, Sam crouched down beside the man with his arms out to block him in the corner without actually touching him. While he buried his head against the wall, the quaking man didn't try to escape even after Sam returned to removing the hood. 

He was torn between an unbearable choice that ultimately wasn't his – of this man being his brother or his brother being dead. 

Inside the hood, Sam found an internally fitted headset with heavy enough padding to block sound. The man shook his head almost violently when Sam began to remove the headphones. 

By the time he peeled back the forehead of the hood, the eyes beneath were squeezed impossibly tight against the room's harsh light. Sam also wanted to close his eyes as he delicately maneuvered the ring gag from the man's compliant mouth and realized the little moisture on it was blood. Even with it out, the man didn't move to close his gaping jaw. 

Sam settled back on his haunches and stared. He'd expected a rush of familiarity or the relief of no recognition, but the longer he looked the less certain he was of either. 

He didn't recognize the pale, sunken face and part of the irritated skin was further obscured by a short, ragged mustache and beard. The facial hair was crimped from having grown against the pressure of the form fitting leather. The hair on the man's head might have been closer to Sam's length if not for being a solid mat. 

They could have put Dean’s tattoo on another man that had once had a similar build to Dean. He needed to see the man's eyes, but the man kept them clamped shut and tried to hide his face in his chest while returning to rocking with increased ferocity. 

Sam put his hands on either side of the man’s face and titled his head up. The man didn't fight being positioned, but also didn't cease his swaying. 

“Dean?” 

In a flash, bleary hazel green eyes with widely dilated pupils were squinting in Sam's general direction. There was no focus in the seemingly sightless eyes, and nearly instantly, they closed again. It was enough. 

In that brief glimpse he had seen the exposed agony and suffocating desperation. He had seen his brother. 

"No...Dean." His brother's name was a cracked sob. "No..." 

All conscious thought evaporated as he reached for his brother. Sam was shaking as badly as Dean. Tears soaked his cheeks by the time he pulled the frighteningly fragile body into his arms. Dean didn’t struggle, barely seemed to notice, when Sam clutched him to his chest. 

Sam's bangs flopped forward as he buried his head against Dean's. He forced himself to ease his hold out of fear for crushing his brother. He didn't release Dean completely, only pulled back far enough to see the broken man not as a stranger, but as his brother. 

Dean’s eyes remained closed. His jaw flexed awkwardly and his mouth was still held open. Another hitched sob shook Sam when he had to lift his sleeve to wipe away a trickle of drool that seeped over Dean's brutally cracked lips. 

"I'm so sorry," Sam whispered as he wiped away his tears enough so that he could see. "I'm gonna get you out of here. It's over, Dean." The words were laden with defeat. 

He was five months too late. 

Sam grasped Dean's wrists and worked to pick the locks of the cuffs. The skin pulled over the stick thin wrists was calloused from too many abrasions. 

Like his mouth, Dean was reluctant or unable to move his arms to a more natural position. Sam didn't want to consider how much muscle atrophy had occurred over the last several months of complete disuse. All it took was a quick glance over Dean to see how much muscle mass had been lost. It wasn't only the restriction of movement. Dean was literally starving. 

His brother, who had only ever wanted a chance to fight, had been left to waste away. 

As badly as he wanted it off his brother, Sam failed in figuring out how the iron ring was attached around Dean's neck. It seemed solid without any breaks. Leaving it for now, Sam moved on to unfasten the cuffs at Dean's ankles, and beneath them found the same deeply irritated calluses as on his wrists. 

Soon the heavy pile of restraints lay discarded on the floor. If the newfound freedom registered with Dean, it didn't show. He only continued to rock in place. 

"Dean." Sam put his hand on his brother's bony shoulder and received no reaction. "Dean, just stop." Even a light shake didn't invoke a response, leaving Sam drowning in frustration. 

All he wanted was to make it better and that was the one thing he knew he couldn't do. 

When the rocking continued unabated, Sam glanced to the discarded hood. He plugged the iPod back in and pressed one of the headphones to his ear. It was a white noise loop. 

He flipped to the next track and jerked the headphones away when an earsplitting shriek played loud enough to leave his ear ringing. Dean stopped his rocking and shifted agitatedly at hearing the sound even from a distance. 

There was no way Sam could force himself to play whatever the next track might be. It was enough to know that the hunters had used noise to torture Dean’s sound deprived ears. Now the absence of the white noise was doing the same. 

Sam unstrapped the headphones from the hood and made sure the white noise loop was again playing on repeat. He turned down the volume then slipped the headphones back over Dean's ears. Almost instantly the sound temporarily pacified the nervous rocking. 

He lifted the fallen jacket and slipped it back over Dean's shoulders. A moment later, Dean shrugged it off despite the fact his skin was cool to the touch. 

The sigh that pushed from Sam's throat was nearly another sob as he shook his head and grabbed the jacket from the floor. He couldn't deal with this here, wasn't sure he could deal with it at all. He just had to get his brother out of here. 

When he bent down to lift Dean, just as he feared, his brother made no effort to even try to extend his legs. 

Most people didn't know what the weight of a man in their arms felt like, but Sam did. More times than he could count, he had struggled with Dean's weight in his arms. That solid man, his big brother, now barely weighed anything at all. 

Dean didn't make even the slightest sound, didn't push away or snuggle towards Sam. He might as well have been carrying a bundle of laundry until Dean somehow sensed they were approaching the doorway. 

Without warning, Dean tried to leap from Sam's arms, blindly struggling when Sam gripped him tighter. Even all but incapacitated, Dean thrashed hard enough that Sam had to brace himself to keep from dropping his panicking brother. 

His instinct was to knock Dean out. Mentally and emotionally it would be easier for them both, but despite his twisting, physically Dean was weak enough that there was too great a risk that he'd never regain consciousness. 

Sam could only wait him out. 

As far as Sam could tell, his brother basically hadn't moved for five months. Stamina was one of the many things he must have lost because the burst of adrenaline was exhausted in well under a minute. Soon Dean was panting breathlessly, limply cradled in Sam's protective grip. 

He knew he should call Bobby and warn him, but knew just as assuredly the words wouldn't come. With the remains of his naked brother pulled against his chest, the only words that rang in his mind were the last words the lead hunter had spoken to him. 

_You'll thank us when you're ready._


End file.
